I’m deeply in love with the collections of the National Archives of Australia. They move me, they inspire me, they make me want to do something. How do I express my love? I’ve written stories about things like atomic bombs, progress, astronomy and weather forecasting — pursuing lives and events documented in the Archives’ rich [...]
[View in Storify] A little hack to reveal faces in the archives.
There seems to be a lot of topic modelling going on at the moment. Any why not? Projects like Mining the Dispatch are demonstrating the possibilities. Tools like Mallet are making it easy. And generous DHers like Ted Underwood and Scott Weingart are doing a great job explaining what it is and how it works. [...]
Earlier this week it was announced that the Mosman Library had been awarded a Library Development Grant for an innovative project that aims to document stories and artefacts relating to the First World War. I’m very excited to be part of it. As well as working with the local community in the creation of a new resource, [...]
This is the full version of a paper I presented at the National Digital Forum, 30 November 2011. In 1901, one of the first acts of the Commonwealth of Australia was to create a system of exclusion and control designed to keep the newly-formed nation ‘white’. But White Australia was always a myth. As well [...]
Entering the web of data [view the presentation...] [view the triples...] Keynote delivered at the annual conference of the Australia and New Zealand Society of Indexers, 14 September 2011. This is me. Today, Wednesday, 14 September 2011, I’m honoured to be able to join you here in the luxurious surrounds of the Brighton Savoy Hotel [...]
Presented at the Life of Information Symposium, 24 September 2010. Slides are available on Slideshare. This palm print belongs to a 12-year-old boy called Charlie Allen. Charlie was born in Sydney in 1896. His mother was Frances Allen (sometime sweet shop owner and brothel keeper), his father Charlie Gum (a buyer for Wing On company). [...]
Some of you may have noticed that my Hacking a research project post featured a file from the National Archives of Australia embedded as a Cooliris widget. Huh? To jog your memory, here it is again: No, it’s not just an image, it’s a little 3D wall. You can pan and zoom to your heart’s [...]
Amongst the holdings of the National Archives of Australia are some of the most visually arresting documents you’ll see — thousands and thousands of forms from the early decades of the twentieth century, each with a portrait photograph and palm print, each documenting the movements of a non-white resident. Along with many other certificates, regulations, [...]
The new version of my Greasemonkey userscript, RecordSearch Image Tools, gives RecordSearch’s digital image pages a rather new look. My previous version had done away with the tired ol ‘lemon-chiffon’ background colour, but I decided it was time to get a bit more adventurous, so I blitzed the old design and rebuilt the page from [...]
Australia is blessed, it seems, with a frightening abundance of treasures. A quick survey of our cultural institutions reveals an escalating ‘treasures race’, as libraries, museums, and archives bombard the public with accounts of their rarest, most beautiful, and most interesting items. The State Library of Victoria, for example, has published a lavish description of [...]
HISTORY OF SCIENCE in Australia is a field intimidated by its subject. Historians have been too slow to examine the local context of knowledge production and use, deferring to scientists and their uncritical catalogues of the past. Historical analysis has given way, too often, to the antiquarian plod or the celebratory frolic.
On Sunday I was listening to the local ABC station, 2CN, when a bloke came on talking about “unsung heroes” of Australian history. Apparently it’s a regular spot, and it so happened that the two heroes being sung on Sunday were scientists – Ferdinand von Mueller the botanist, and John Tebbutt, the astronomer. However, my [...]
